Model-Driven Systems Engineering

Engineering software for modern systems of systems demands integrating
solutions from multiple domains. The successful deployment of automated
vehicles, mobile robots or the smart cyber-physical production systems of
Industry 4.0 is impossible without integrating the modules developed
by participating domain experts. As each domain features their own specific and
optimized methods, tools, and languages, their successful integration is a
crucial prerequisite for engineering future's systems of systems.

Model-driven engineering reduces the conceptual gap between the problem
domains (such as navigation, grasping, or business process description) domains
and the solution domains (programming) of discourse. Modeling languages enables
domain experts to describe solutions without facing the
accidental complexities and idiosyncrasies of programming languages.
For instance, employing an optimized modeling language to describe robotic
assembly tasks such as LightRocks
liberates the assembly expert from handling pointers, exceptions, or networking
otherwise encountered when programming the tasks using general-purpose
programming languages (such as C++ or Java) instead. Smart model transformations
and code generators embody such programming expertise and can ensure that
translation of domain-specific models conforms to state-of-the-art software
engineering practices.

Research Questions

What are the software languages required for efficient systems
engineering with domain experts? How are these engineered, integrated,
and reused? How does this translate to modeling tools, analyses,
transformations, and code generators?

What are the theoretical foundations of systems engineering language
integration and how can we exploit these to enable language components
that support off-the-shelf reuse?

How can we modularize language processing tooling along the language
integration degrees of freedom to easily reusing the same tooling
with different language combinations?

How can we leverage architecture description languages to facilitate
the separation of concerns required for efficient language integration
and reuse?

Team Members

Currently, the model-driven systems engineering working group consists of:

Dr. Andreas Wortmann(team leader)

Arvid Butting, M.Sc.

Manuela Dalibor, M.Sc.

David Schmalzing, M.Sc.

Teaching

Our research activities and their results influence the courses we offer.
In the past, research in model-driven engineering, software language engineering,
and their application to robotics manifested in project classes and seminars: